The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has developed a new approach for collecting natural resource management statistics. The approach involves the ABS combining data held by local and state/territory government agencies with information from the cadastre (a register of property boundaries) to design a survey. This approach allows for surveys to be tailored to specific regions or issues and enables more regional information to be produced than is possible with the current ABS surveys of agriculture and natural resource management.

An initial trial of the approach was undertaken in Eurobodalla Shire of NSW and published on 4 November 2005. A second trial has been conducted in the Fitzroy and Livingstone Shires of Queensland. The key feature of this publication is the flexibility of spatial outputs. Data are presented using five different geographical boundaries; by Shire, for the Fitzroy River riparian zone, by the coastal zone, by radial zones from the Rockhampton City Centre and by neighbourhood catchments.